tate to its children. Free and compulsory education is still mainly
justified on the ground that it produced good citizens.

But the women had not full citizenship and hence the argument for
general education did not apply to them. Had they been enfranchised
after the Revolution, all educational opportunities would have been open
to them at once as a matter of course; and an immense amount of
struggle, futile effort, and unnecessary friction would have been saved.
But this larger view of woman's rights and powers would have required an
adjustment in deep-seated ideas and prejudices, concerning her proper
position, too great to be undertaken by men facing a new form of
government and the material problems of a new world.

But even without this change in ideas, economic conditions steadily
forced the women into educational activity. There were not enough men
available to teach the scattered country schools, and citizens had to be
trained for the needs of the new democracy. John Adams recognized this
when he wrote to Mr. Warren that their wives must "teach their sons the
divine science of politics;" though he would have been one of the last
to favor admitting women to full participation in public life. He did
not realize that if women were to train men for citizenship, the
rudiments of knowledge which they had learned in scattered schools and
in their poor little academies must be greatly supplemented. Life,
however, is never logical, and at this advance men balked. Necessity was
forcing women into schools as teachers, and hence into larger
preparation for their own lives; but public opinion, here as elsewhere,
failed to recognize the forces that were compelling its action.

Thus the work of furnishing more advanced intellectual training for
American women had to be started by the women themselves. This is
possibly the first time in human history that a great group of people
feeling itself irresistibly moving toward a social, industrial and
political readjustment, little less than revolutionary in its nature,
has gone deliberately to work to prepare for the change through
education. The working classes of the world are doing the same thing
now; but women showed them the way. In some vague degree, American
women recognized the truth which Dr. Gore recently brought before a mass
of working men in England. "All this passion for justice will accomplish
nothing," he declared, "unless you get knowledge. You may become strong
a